Spaceport: Technical Lands for Departing Earth

Abstract

Spaceport: Technical Lands for Departing Earth proposes a new way of understanding how technological uses of place-based science was designed and imagined for both industrial and military activities in postwar America. It is argued in this book, the American spaceport as a complex series of technical lands were enabled through its architecture and aesthetics in the background of Cold War politics, economics, and technologies. Beginning with the opaque blockhouse underground as a port and expanding facilities for assembly, the entire spaceport complex can be understood as an enclosed system of both architectural and geographic space. This design research of the spaceport is not a linear history of postwar America. As dissertation of design, this research is structured by moving across space and time—beginning inside the launch complex interior and outwards through the mobile architectural objects at the departure of earth. This translation of spatial movement starts with the core and ends with the capsules at the scale of the expanded geographic frontier. The spaceport signals changes in structure, scale, and space. Departing earth through a series of carefully enclosed and discrete objects, architecture began to move further outwards in space. As a nuanced condition, the spaceport as a constellation of architectural objects problematizes its contribution with respect to the policies and history of aerospace technology. As a non-linear critical narrative, this dissertation is told as a concept from the construction of the spaceport imaginaries to its inevitable abandonment as wasteland.